We were talking about the want of diversity in American life, the lack of salient characters.  It was not at a club.  It was a spontaneous talk of people who happened to be together, and who had fallen into an uncompelled habit of happening to be together.  There might have been a club for the study of the Want of Diversity in American Life.  The members would have been obliged to set apart a stated time for it, to attend as a duty, and to be in a mood to discuss this topic at a set hour in the future.  They would have mortgaged another precious portion of the little time left us for individual life.  It is a suggestive thought that at a given hour all over the United States innumerable clubs might be considering the Want of Diversity in American Life.  Only in this way, according to our present methods, could one expect to accomplish anything in regard to this foreign-felt want.  It seems illogical that we could produce diversity by all doing the same thing at the same time, but we know the value of congregate effort.  It seems to superficial observers that all Americans are born busy.  It is not so.  They are born with a fear of not being busy; and if they are intelligent and in circumstances of leisure, they have such a sense of their responsibility that they hasten to allot all their time into portions, and leave no hour unprovided for.  This is conscientiousness in women, and not restlessness.  There is a day for music, a day for painting, a day for the display of tea-gowns, a day for Dante, a day for the Greek drama, a day for the Dumb Animals’ Aid Society, a day for the Society for the Propagation of Indians, and so on.  When the year is over, the amount that has been accomplished by this incessant activity can hardly be estimated.  Individually it may not be much.  But consider where Chaucer would be but for the work of the Chaucer clubs, and what an effect upon the universal progress of things is produced by the associate concentration upon the poet of so many minds.

A cynic says that clubs and circles are for the accumulation of superficial information and unloading it on others, without much individual absorption in anybody.  This, like all cynicism, contains only a half-truth, and simply means that the general diffusion of half-digested information does not raise the general level of intelligence, which can only be raised to any purpose by thorough self-culture, by assimilation, digestion, meditation.  The busy bee is a favorite simile with us, and we are apt to overlook the fact that the least important part of his example is buzzing around.  If the hive simply got together and buzzed, or even brought unrefined treacle from some cyclopaedia, let us say, of treacle, there would be no honey added to the general store.